Today’s Words:
midriff
pit
cecum
cheat
gulag
amphigory
cameo

Thank you Emma for putting the daily words off to the right. I’m finally whipping up word furrows directly in wordpress, and from the comfort of the chair in my room, with laptop atop lap.

I ended up with a few family heirlooms from my grandma Dickinson. A pair of opera glasses, brass, with mother-of-pearl inlay. I don’t know what became of those. I have a feeling my Dad absconded with them.

I also have a cameo.  I think it’s of a young girl looking out over a pastoral landscape. Can’t remember because I haven’t taken it out in years. In high school I used to wear it all the time. I thought it was realy cool.  Then somehow, or someone, put the notion in my head that it would be utterly tragic to lose such an heirloom. Such an heirloom must be guarded carefully.  So I’ve kept it ever since in a safe place.

My safe place is this little book I bought in a hardware store. The center of the book has been hollowed out, to make a rectangular space for valuables. I keep credit cards in their that i’m not using, the cameo, a gold watch from grandma Dickinson, and some cash.

Today, I hid a twenty dollar bill in my car, and then I wondered why I had never hidden a twenty in my car. Here’s why I hid the twenty in my car. I left the house to go to the burger ville — the city of burgers about 5 blocks from my house. At the city of burgers, they sell the Tillamook cheeseburger. This is a means of satsifying hunger for three bucks.

Only, I raced off to the city of the burger with no money. So I came back and grabbed my wallet, and then stashed a twenty in the car. For some emergency.

Now, it does cross my mind that I may have invited an emergency to happen in my life. By visualizing it, by preparing for it, I have paved the way for a reason to use that twenty. We’ll see. for, if I were to follow that logic, I’d never get my teeth cleaned. Getting near all that drilling equipment would just invite dental disaster, n’est-ce pas?

Grandma Dickinson didn’t really endow me with much more than  gold watch and a cameo, stored in a book. O–she sent me a poem that she wrote one time–and she also sent me a few books of poetry. She did, however, teach me about the care and cleaning of a cameo. Cameos, she said, are best maintained with hair oil. Don’t wash your hair for three or four days. Let the oil build up. Then rub your hair on the cameo.

But come to think of it, I’ve never washed my cameo.

I am thinking now of letting the cameo out of the book.  I must find a way of having it set, or a means of hanging it around my neck.

This dirty old man named Manny (har har) who used to have all of us high school girls over to get stoned — he gave me this beautiful necklace one time.

I used to love the necklace. A gold setting. 6 tiny rubies. In the center, a 7th stone, a tiny diamond. I loved the necklace–as long as I didn’t let it remind me of Manny. Then one time, when wrestling Pam Seltzer (who later changed her name to Pam Shepherd), I lost the necklace. We were in Roosevelt Park. I returned to the park a few times hopeing to find it, but never did.

I remember I used to let my midriff show in those days. And there’s a picture of me on the last day of 11th grade. My midriff is resplendent. The lock, which I had removed from my locker that day, was hitched to one of my belt loops. I have a hippie bandana tied over my head, and my hippie braids hang down almost to my waist.

I hope this amphigory has not left pockmarks or pits in your cecum, nor that you’ve felt cheated out of the gulag which was your rightful due when sitting down to examine the furrow.